Through an exploration of handmade paper, Ann Hamilton focuses on the relationship between tactile and linguistic experience. Paper Chorus explores the sound vocabularies of paper through a concert in collaboration with Bang on a Can. The artist asks, “In a time when successive generations of technology amplify human presence at a distance far greater than the reach of the hand to touch or voice to space, what becomes the place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body?” Recognizing how the paper works’ visual presence is transformed when activated by a body in motion, the artist began thinking about the work not as a static object but as a vehicle of sound. The paper components rustle, rattle, and reverberate when animated by the body. The project grew from contemplating how the mute action of a hand waving is greater than the call of one’s voice to signal at a distance, and how that motion could be amplified by the paper components. Hamilton’s geometric paper forms embedded with silk and raw wool, include pockets for the hand, arm, or leg, enabling the sheets of thin abaca paper to be worn. Some shapes were conceived for individual use—a wing-shaped arm element for example—or others that could be worn collectively, such as the series of “mitten-like” hand pieces connected by fabric panels.

About the Artist

Ann Hamilton (b. 1956, Lima, Ohia) is a visual artist internationally recognized for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Responsive to the contingencies of the sites where she works, her recurring forms—cloth, texts spoken and written, animals, and people suspended or in motion—immerse viewers in an atmosphere both visceral and literary, individual and collective, animate and inanimate, silent and spoken. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton's art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason and imagination. 

In a time when successive generations of technology amplify human presence at distances far greater than the reach of the hand, what becomes the place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body? How does making participate in the recuperation and recognition of embodied knowledge? What are the places and forms for live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media-saturated world? These concerns have animated the site-responsive installations that have formed the bulk of Hamilton's practice over the last 20 years. But where the relations of cloth, sound, touch, motion, and human gesture once gave way to dense materiality, Hamilton's work now focuses on the less material acts of reading, speaking, and listening. The influence of collaborative processes in ever more complex architectures has shifted her forms of making, wherein the movement of the viewer in time and in space now becomes a central figure of the work.

Ann Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hamilton has served on the faculty of The Ohio State University since 2001, where she is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art.

Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She represented the United States in the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal and the 1999 Venice Biennale and has exhibited extensively around the world. Her major commissions include projects for Waterfront Seattle (upcoming); Park Avenue Armory (2013); The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2010); The Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (2006); La Maison Rouge Fondation de Antoine Galbert, Paris, France (2005); Historiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2004); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2003); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2003, 1991); The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan (2001); The Musee d'art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1996); The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); The Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988).(Source: Artist’s Website)

For more information, please visit their website: https://www.annhamiltonstudio.com

Available Works

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